Vicious Guns

A friend of mine who had gone through a long and dateless dry spell had hooked up with a new girlfriend. Time passed, and all seemed good — meaning they were still together. One night over beers we asked him whether the affair had been, you know, consummated. “Nah,” he said. “We haven’t pulled that emotional trigger yet.” I’d heard The Act described in a hundred different ways but never in the sense that carnal knowledge carried darker implications, mentally.

Sexual politics is a subject that Vicious Guns loves to dissect. “Sometimes you can’t get out of bed,” sings Jennie Vicious, a bottle blonde who looks as if she just stepped out of an American Apparel ad. “Some things are best left unsaid.” Men and women, as the rest of the song goes, cannot have sex and still be friends.

Jennie Vicious says the first concert she saw was Michael Jackson’s Victory Tour in 1984. She was 19. She admits to putting style before function in the conception of her band with fellow Canadian Richey Vicious. She says she came up with the name Vicious Guns well before there was an actual Vicious Guns band and that the motivation for making music came out of a T-shirt design with a handgun on it that she was silk-screening for friends.

Together, Jennie and Richey are hungry, wolf-thin types who split the duties. He plays guitar with a host of electronic effects set on overdrive, and she plays simple bass lines but explores her songs about human psychoanalytics in a cloying, Euro-pop voice. When asked about their relationship status, she emails this: “Richey and I may or may not have been lovers in previous lives.” Vicious Guns are new-wave redux, Eurythmics meets house music, but with a distinct Freudian bent to their song lyrics. Brainy but danceable.